2 August 2013

The bug that allowed fake chargers to hack your iPhone has finally been fixed by Apple. Good! But you won’t get the software fix until iOS 7. Apple was alerted of the security hole earlier this year and the hack was demonstrated at the Black Hat hacking convention on Wednesday.

27 July 2013

The connected house you can control from the internet or your smartphone? They might be called a smart homes, but some of them have some very dumb vulnerabilities. In fact, some of the houses made smart by a company called Insteon were insecure enough that a Forbes reporter could hack them from the comfort of her living room.

25 July 2013

Your Android phone is not safe. This 3D-printed robot systematically tries all of the possible lock screen PINs for your phone until it gets in. With your standard four-digit number, your phone is compromised in under a day. If only you’d had an iPhone!

23 July 2013

Things that were once dumb are now smart. At least that’s the trend for home appliances as of late. Canary, the self-proclaimed world’s first smart home security system, is launching today on Indiegogo, and it might actually work.

It sometimes feels like there’s a big data breach in the news every week — but some are far worse than others. This data visualisation shows the world’s biggest data breaches to date, and how they compare over time.

Apple revealed late yesterday that its Developer Center had been forced out of action by “an intruder”. But a researcher has provided evidence to confirm that the downtime was a result of his identification of a security vulnerability.

20 July 2013

On Friday, the secret court that oversees cases related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewed the order that enables the NSA to compel American telcos to hand over records whenever it wants. Translation: No end in sight to the NSA spying on phone records.

Skype has long claimed to be “end-to-end encrypted”, an architectural category that suggests conversations over the service would be difficult or impossible to eavesdrop upon, even given control of users’ internet connections. But Skype’s 2005 independent security review admits a caveat to this protection: “defeat of the security mechanisms at the Skype Central Server” could facilitate a “man-in-the-middle attack” (see section 3.4.1).

19 July 2013

In the past several weeks, EFF has received many requests for advice about privacy tools that provide technological shields against mass surveillance. We’ve been interested for many years in software tools that help people protect their own privacy; we’ve defended your right to develop and use cryptographic software, we’ve supported the development of the Tor software and written privacy software of our own. This article looks at some of the available tools to blunt the effects of mass surveillance.